zigbee and BLE in the same board

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 12:27:04 GMT

@meetandyhere: Nordic is not going to develop any Zigbee stack in-house, so anyone who want to run Zigbee on a nRF52840 will have to use a 3rd party stack that has been ported to the nRF52840. So yes you will have to port your existing stack to the nRF52840 or use a 3rd party stack that's already been ported to the nR52840. My suggestion would be to contact you local Nordic Sales Manager as he might be able to point you to to a stack provider.

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

meetandyhere — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 09:50:15 GMT

Hi Bjørn, this is a late follow-up to the thread, but I had a similar question. I am running Thread and BLE multi protocol on the NRF52840. Next, I want to try Zigbee and BLE multiprotocol. You mentioned that this is possible in principle. How difficult would it be in practice? We have legacy devices (~ 2014) that run a Zigbee application on the Ember chip and now we want to talk to them with the NRF52840. Would this involve taking our entire legacy Zigbee stack and running it (with minimal modifications) on the NRF52840? Does Nordic have any tools to facilitate this? Thanks!, Andy

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

bjorn-spockeli — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 07:37:05 GMT

Yes, the nRF5840 will be able to run the BLE stack and the 802.15.4 stack(with a Zigbee stack on top) concurrently.

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

Johan — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 06:15:56 GMT

Hi Bjørn, With the coming nRF52840, can you run the Zigbee stack concurrently with the BLE stack or at least in a (to the end user) a seamless operation?

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 11:49:02 GMT

Hi again, I just want to make you aware of our new SoC, the nRF52840 which supports BLE, 802.15.4 and ZigBee, you can read more about it here. Just be aware that it will not go into production until Q3 2017 and the 802.15.4 is still in development. However, if you have time to wait, then I would recommend going for the nRF52840 as this will be a single SoC solution, i.e. you do not need to worry about coexistence issues.

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:43:03 GMT

Ok, just note that the nRF51822 does not have such a co-existence interface, i.e. you cannot tell the SoftDevice(the BLE stack) to hold off sending a packet if signaled by another MCU as this will break its real-time BLE protocol requirements. I do not know if the Zigbee stack on the ATMEGA256RFR2 supports this, but this is something you should look into.

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

Esteban Gutiérrez Correa — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 13:59:17 GMT

Thanks Bjørn Spockeli,

I'll keep it in mind, the SoC Zigbee I want to use is the ATMEGA256RFR2, and I think that I will do that the nRF51822 signals the ZigBee SoC, to make a switch between the radios.

RE: zigbee and BLE in the same board

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 10:47:44 GMT

Having two wireless SoC on the same board that run their protocols independently is challenging as one might transmit while the other is receiving. How often will the two SoCs be active at the same time? Do you have a specific Zigbee SoC in mind? If so, do you know if has a co-existence interface, i.e. if the nRF51822 signals the ZigBee SoC via a gpio, then it will hold off its radio operations until the nRF51822 is finished?